Welcome to the Best Games Ever Show episode 50: The best game that is uncomfortably pro-monarchy.
Video games are absurdly monarchist. Nintendo’s biggest franchises both have you running around after a princess. Final Fantasy is littered with royals showing up as quest givers, party members, and protagonists. Fable III is entirely about seizing your divine right to rule, and leads to an infamous sequence where you are tasked with deciding the fate of the kingdom through a series of binary decisions: the point of the sequence is, arguably, to show how difficult it is for a sovereign to keep all of their subjects happy and/or alive. For the most part, video game monarchies are treated sympathetically: the medium plays host to more pro-Royal sentiment than the home stands at Ibrox.
So games are, therefore, hostile ground for most republicans (not to be confused with Republicans, who tend to love video games because they’re also full of guns). But which games are the most uncomfortably regal? The most odiously knee-bending? The most simperingly crown-pilled? And of them, which is the best, according to our esteemed panel? In order to find out, you’ll have to listen to this here podcast here.
You could also simply read the summary below, if you’re the sort of person who skips to the last page of a book (a wrongun, a reprobate, a Bad Seed).
Tom
Tom picked Football Manager, need you ask. You’d probably be surprised if he’d picked something else. But he didn’t. Although, he did pretend to for a bit, that was exciting. But then he didn’t. Which was less exciting. Thanks Tom.
Kelsey
Kelsey chose Long Live the Queen, a stat-based visual novel about court intrigue and questionable consent laws.
Connor
World of Warcraft is, perhaps, the most royalty-obsessed game of them all, with its decades-long storylines ever preoccupied with who sits on which throne. It also, as Connor points out, plays host to innumerable guilds, which all have masters. A micro-monarchy of sorts. And some of them like to, uh, partake in a little Light Embezzlement.
“What is VG247’s Best Games Ever Podcast?” you ask? Well, it is essentially a 30-minute panel show where people (Jim Trinca and associates) decide on the best game in a specific category. That’s it. It’s good. Listen to it.
Come back in a week for another exciting instalment of the Best Games Ever Show.